Risk


Sometimes I like to pretend the game is about massive giants shooting massive cannons at each other.

Some time ago, I mentioned my general distaste for board games – a distaste rooted in the fact that my attention span makes it difficult to remember long lists of rules without a computer there to help me, and the fact that I generally don’t fare very well in competitive situations. Playing a board game, for me, is pretty much opening myself up to once again be bested by somebody else, and up until recently I had no interest in playing a board game enough to get good at it.

Because, really, what do you stand to gain from being really, really good at a board game? All you get are bragging rights, and what you’re bragging about is only really important to people who’re familiar with the game. If you’re really good at basketball, people will assume that you can jump high and dunk and execute a mean bounce-pass. If you’re really good at a board game, people will assume that you can sit on the floor for long periods of time, presumably because you don’t have a job or girlfriend to distract you.

So when Patrick told me last month that he was starting up a weekly Risk game and I was invited, my decision to participate wasn’t motivated by the, “Risk is really fun, I think you’ll enjoy it” part of the conversation, but rather the “I’m going to order a couple of pizzas” part.

A month later, as I write this I’m browsing board game message boards for new gameplay variants and looking for a cheap copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War on Amazon. At long last, I have found a board game that I’m motivated to get really good at – although a lot of that could simply be because I’m motivated to beat the other people playing.

Like poker, a game of Risk is maybe 30% about the game and 70% about the people playing it. Casino Royale wasn’t about cards, it was about a bunch of people trying to fool and screw one another over while playing cards. Risk is like that, only it’s world domination and the people aren’t nearly as good looking.

The manual lays out the fairly simple rules for attacking and defending (determined by dice rolls, with the defender winning ties), accumulating new armies (the number is based both on the number of territories you control and the Risk cards you’ve accumulate), and winning*, but it stops just short of regulating in any way the wheeling and dealing of forging alliances with the other players, nor does it penalize you for going back on those deals when your friends need your help the most. It’s basically a sandbox in which you can exercise all your sociopathic urges against your friends, and that’s exactly what we do.

*Some people play variants of Risk that are designed for a shorter gameplay experience – the person controlling the most territories after five turns wins, for example, or the first to complete all the ‘secret missions’ on his Risk cards. These people are wusses. Like straight OGs, we play until one person controls every territory on the board.

Patrick, who owns the Risk board and hosts the games at his apartment, works the diplomacy angle the hardest, constantly urging the other players into suicide missions against his enemies between turns and striking under the table deals to facilitate another player’s downfall as soon as the player in question leaves to go to the bathroom. In spite of this, his one rule is that as a matter of principal he never goes back on any of the deals he forges with other players – he’s sort of like a really Machiavellian Batman in that respect.

Amanda, Patrick’s girlfriend, forgoes negotiation of any sort in favor of taking control of a continent, blockading herself in, and waiting it out for several turns, amassing significant bonus reinforcements because she controls an entire continent, before breaking out and demolishing the other weakened players. (This was how she won our most recent game, much to her boyfriend’s chagrin.)

Tommy, who picked up Risk at the same time that I did, builds his entire strategies around inconceivable luck and acts of God that allowed him to win the first game of Risk he ever played and be narrowly defeated at the end of the second game. It’s like he’s just better at rolling dice than the rest of us.

I, to some degree, copy Amanda’s strategy of blockading the first continent I can get my hands on and waiting until the time is right to make my move – however, I’m not above underhanded acts of terrorism in order to get ahead. (During one all night game, I started intentionally eating cheese and farting in hopes of convincing the other players to forfeit. They did not, and we played for another three hours with the windows open.)

Scruggs, Patrick’s best friend, is pure, absolute, black hearted evil. He has no interest in winning the game, and instead plays only to frustrate, infuriate, and troll the other players by invading one of their territories just so he can deny them a continent bonus, intentionally not attacking stronger players so they’ll demolish everyone, pursuing suicidal acts of vengeance against anyone who’s ever attacked him... He’s The Joker to Patrick’s Batman; when Alfred says that some men just want to watch the world burn, he’s talking about Scruggs.

Maybe that’s why I like Risk so much – the epic scale is fun and all, but it’s really more of a sociological litmus test to determine to learn just how horribly your friends will behave in the pursuit of something they want.

Truman Capps thinks Risk would be a bad addition to Family Game Night for that very reason.

The Life Aquatic With Truman Capps


The alternate title for this update was 'Swimfan.' I opted to go with this poster because it looks better than Bill Murray in a Speedo.


The other day I picked up my friend Patrick at LAX. He tossed his bag in the backseat, hopped in next to me, and once we’d dispensed with the pleasantries he asked me what I’d been up to recently.

“Well,” I said, at a loss for anything really interesting to say. “I’ve been swimming. That’s new, I guess.”

“What, like, you’ve got a friend with a pool and you went and hung out there?”

“No. I’ve been going to the Culver City Municipal Pool and swimming laps. I’m trying to get into better shape, and swimming is the one kind of exercise I think I can sort of enjoy.”

“Interesting.” Patrick said. “I always had you pegged as a power lifter and a martial artist.”

“Yeah, well, I had to branch out. It’s been really awkward around the dojo ever since I killed my sensei in that mountaintop duel.”

Why did I choose swimming as my form of exercise? Well, there are a number of reasons.

1) Don Draper did it in season 4 of Mad Men. That alone accounts for about 70% of my motivation.

2) Swimming exercises everything at once, which is great for me, because I hate making those dumb little charts of how many reps I have to do and remembering on which day I work which muscle groups. The more thought I have to apply to an exercise regimen, the less likely I am to do it. With swimming, you just have to show up and do it until you’re tired.

3) You don’t get all sweaty and gross when you swim – and I’m aware that the term ‘sweaty and gross’ makes me sound like a ten year old girl, but when it comes to exercise, I kind of am a ten year old girl. I don’t like being sweaty and musky because hygiene is important to me, hence why I opted to submerge myself in a public swimming pool full of God knows how much pee.

4) I apparently look like an idiot when I try to engage in any other form of physical activity. “Truman, it’s hilarious when you try to do a push-up.” “Oh my God, Truman, go back and run for us again, you look so funny.” “We were just laughing because you have a really weird way of walking.” Maybe, just maybe, swimming is the form of exercise where everyone sees me doing it and goes, “Saaaaaayyy…”

The precedent for #4 is encouraging: Michael Phelps was just some spaz with ADD until his Mom made him join a swim team to try and focus his energy, and it turned out he was not only a natural but the best there ever was because the funky shape of his body made him perfect for swimming. I mean, imagine if she’d had him join the marching band. Then he just would’ve been a sub-par, goofy looking trombone player, as if we need more of those.

My first trip to the pool was pretty nerve wracking, and I had to sit in the car listening to rap music to psych myself up for a good fifteen minutes before walking in.*

*Since you ask, I was listening to the only rap song on my iPhone: Get Back, by Ludacris. It’s an almost comically angry song, yet I empathize with it because Luda apparently hates being touched almost as much as I do.

My fear wasn’t drowning – believe it or not, I actually took a couple years’ worth of swimming lessons as a kid and am fully capable of handling myself in the water – but rather that I would encounter the Helpful Dude at the pool.

My longstanding, crippling fear of the Helpful Dude is the reason I don’t go to the gym – he’s the relentlessly good looking and friendly guy who sees you struggling with a six pound weight and comes over, all smiles, to give you some tips. Hi there. What’s your name? Hi Truman, my name’s Ty. Looks like you’re having some trouble there. Ha ha ha! Mind if I give you a couple pointers?

I’m sure that Ty (whose girlfriend is one of the Clipper Dancers) really thinks he’s doing me a favor, but what I’m hearing is, Hey there Truman, my name’s Ty. Me and all the other Beautiful People were laughing at you earlier, but I started to feel a little bad about it, so I came over here to feel good about myself, because the only socially acceptable thing you can do is thank me profusely and take my advice.

And I don't want that. It makes me feel like I've been making an ass of myself without knowing it, and now with the knowledge that I've been making an ass of myself, I'm incredibly self conscious and want to just burn the gym to the ground so that nobody finds out. Honestly, given a choice between being attacked by Helpful Guy or just being a fat disgusting fuck, I'd probably rather take the latter, because nobody's ever tried to give me pointers on how to eat potato chips.

Once I was sufficiently psyched up I made my way through the locker room, past the squad of elderly naked exhibitionists who seem to live in every pool locker room on Earth, changed into my swimming apparel, and went out to the pool to get started.

As it turns out, the reason that swimming is such good exercise is because it’s hard as fuck. Water has twelve times the resistance of air, which means that swimming fifty meters across the pool is like walking 600 meters,* only you can’t breathe without pulling your head out of the water, gasping, and inadvertently swallowing some chlorine-pee cocktail, which in turn makes you flail around and doggie-paddle in the middle of the pool for a little while before you can get back into your rhythm.

*There is literally no way that can be right.

After a few trips to the pool, I’d gotten to the point where I could swim five full laps before I was exhausted and had to climb out. Don’t bother doing the math – my ceiling was half a mile. That was the most that I could swim.

The problem with swimming half a mile is that it’s only really impressive if you’re injured and trying to escape some mortal peril while you’re doing it.

After the Germans torpedoed his carrier, he swam half a mile back to shore with a chunk of shrapnel in his back while simultaneously dragging a developmentally disabled orphan! He’s a hero!

After he made a New Year’s resolution to get into shape, he swam half a mile at the Culver City Municipal Pool, and then rewarded himself with In-N-Out afterwards. He’s a hero!

See? Not as good. It’s a decent start, sure, but it’s nowhere near as impressive as the guys at the pool who are three times my age swimming three times as many laps in one third of the time. I resolved that I was just going to have to work my way up.

Today I went to the pool determined to swim six laps. With dogged perseverance, I went back and forth across the pool five times. As I sat on the pool steps catching my breath and psyching myself up for my record breaking sixth lap, though, I saw an impossibly handsome lifeguard walking up to me, smiling.


“Hi there,” he said. “What’s your name?”


“Hey Truman. My name’s Tony. Looks like you’ve been having some trouble - mind if I give you some pointers?”






The classicest of Truman Capps moments.

Through our conversation, it came out that he and the other lifeguards had some ‘concerns’ about me – namely, that I was going to drown in the middle of the pool. From a swimming standpoint that’s bad, but I was able to convince a bunch of trained lifeguards that I’d never taken swimming lessons or even been in the water before, which, from an acting standpoint, is probably pretty good, right?

I did the only socially acceptable thing and thanked Tony for his advice and concerns, then got out of the pool and went inside to shower, leaving my five lap record intact. I’m all about setting and achieving goals, but one of my big goals in life is to not be the major source of concern in an environment where I’m the only one under 60 without a heart condition.

What I’m coming to accept is that I’m really only in my element when I’m sitting down with Internet access and a Philly Cheesesteak is somewhere within reach. I really love writing and I would go so far as to call it a skill that I have; the problem is that writing on a regular basis doesn’t do the same things for your longevity and overall fuckability that swimming does.

The decision I have to make now is whether I design a workout routine I can do entirely in the privacy of my room, far away from Helpful Dude’s prying eyes, or if I just keep going to the pool and wait for the day Tony submits his screenplay to a production company I wind up working for.

Hi there, what’s your name? Hi Tony, my name’s Truman. Looks like you’re having some trouble with your second act. Ha ha ha! Mind if I give you a couple pointers?

Truman Capps would much rather lifeguards just leave him the hell alone until his head has gone under the surface for the third time.

Humpalump


He's dreaaaaamy.

By no means is the Oregon Marching Band a classy institution. Hell – to call that organization ‘civil’ on their very best day would still be a pretty gross exaggeration. By and large, it’s a group of people who were nerds all through high school thanks to their enthusiasm for band, the most maligned of the school music ensembles, and as a result their senses of humor run to the obscure, the absurd, and the catastrophically puerile and filthy. I was in it for four years and all of those things I just said apply to me in spades.

It’s interesting, the circumstances under which people get close to one another. I mean, you sort of take it for granted that a large group of very different personalities can bond and become greater than the sum of their parts in some sort of Full Metal Jacket situation where they’re fighting the Viet Cong and death is around every corner, or even in a Remember The Titans situation where they’re fighting to win a state championship and end racism.

A marching band, though, is different – what a band does is not directly competitive or explicitly demanding; it’s just a cold, wet, boring slog to the finish so you can perform for a half-empty stadium while everybody either reads the paper or hotboxes the handicapped-accessible bathroom on the concourse. You wouldn’t think there’d be a lot of camaraderie in that environment, but there is – and it’s strong. For those of you keeping score at home, that was why I did it.

Eric Humphrey joined the trumpet section as a freshman last year. He had a remarkable enthusiasm that he brought to everything he did – he was always busting his ass to get his music memorized before anyone else, consistently early to rehearsals, always with a smile on his face – which, to burned out seniors like myself who would’ve just as soon stuffed the entire marching band into a cannon and shot it into the sun at that point, was quaint, borderline adorable behavior.

Looking back, it’s weird how quickly we warmed to Eric in spite of the fact that, as a Mormon, he didn’t participate in the drinking end of our shenanigans – shenanigans that are a pretty big part of social acceptance in the OMB. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he still came to our parties – he just didn’t drink, and was still able to have a good time and avoid the judgmental, holier-than-thou bullshit I used to engage in back in my teetotaling days.

Rereading what I’ve got so far, it sounds a lot like I’ve got a pretty huge boner for Eric Humphrey, and, y’know, maybe I do, because he kind of reminds me of a better version of myself at an earlier age, and Lord knows I’ve got a boner for myself.

But the thing is, basically everybody in the Oregon Marching Band has a boner for Eric Humphrey. That’s what I’m trying to get across to those of you who don’t know him and can’t understand why I’m devoting so much space to talking about him – he’s the rare member of the OMB who pretty much everyone likes. They nicknamed him Humpalump.

Late in 2011, Eric was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma, a form of bone cancer. There’s a malignant tumor in his shoulder, and he’s undergoing between seven and nine months of chemotherapy, with surgery to remove the tumor somewhere in the middle of the process.

I think jackasses who cheat on their wives and yell at waiters probably get just as much cancer as the Eric Humphreys of the world, so maybe ‘unfair’ isn’t the right way to describe what’s happening to my friend. ‘Shitty’ applies pretty well. Every day we get it hammered home to us that bad things happen to good people with astounding and uncompromising regularity, but you never really appreciate it until it happens to one of the good people who you know.

Eric finished his first round of chemo four days before the marching band left for the Rose Bowl. He insisted on going to the game with the band, and, on the day that he had his lowest post-chemo white blood cell count, he got on Bus 1 with the rest of the trumpet section for the first leg of the drive to LA. He participated in all the rehearsals and pregame events, and marched the six mile Tournament of Roses Parade with the band. Eric did these things because he is a badass.

Out of solidarity for Eric and his chemo, around 20 other members of the OMB shaved their heads before or during the trip. OMB members are selling T-shirts and beanies to support Eric’s treatments, and during the parade the entire band wore yellow ribbons – which, according to Wikipedia, can have a variety of meanings, but in this case meant, ‘Eric has cancer, fuck you, cancer.’


Things like this make me proud to have been in the Oregon Marching Band. It is not a classy organization, but it is full of some of the best, most generous and caring people you could ever hope to meet. Say what you will about our uniforms - we take care of our own. To that end:

There’s a PayPal donation button on the sidebar of my blog. Click that button to donate money to Eric’s family to help cover the various costs associated with having cancer. If you’re on the fence about whether to do it or not, you should probably do it.

Eric will undoubtedly beat this thing, because as I may have mentioned earlier, he’s a badass. Really, Eric Humphrey doesn’t have cancer – cancer has Eric Humphrey, and cancer is fucked.

Truman Capps is trying to assuage his guilt over not shaving his head.

Regarding Donations:
In the interests of transparency, you should know that in lieu of a direct line to Eric’s family, the money donated will currently go into a PayPal account of my own creation. At a later date, barring a more direct method of donation, the whole contents of this account will be transferred to the Humphrey family. If they do not accept the donations, the money will instead be donated to the American Cancer Society.

Yes, the money is going into a personal account of mine – that’s because right now this is the simplest way I know of to do it. I have no money in my PayPal account, so I know that anything that winds up in there belongs to Eric and not me. Likewise, I should probably point out that I won’t take any of the money for my own use, because it’s being donated to help my friend fight cancer, and I’m not a bad person.

Unemployment


Like me, these people are unemployed. Unlike me, they will speak to a real person at some point. Also, some of them are ethnic.


The days of me being gainfully employed in a whorehouse have sadly come to an end, and now I’ve reached the stage where I get to deposit my various paychecks from the various jobs I did late in 2011, and then watch with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as the number in my checking account rises to a dizzying (by my standards) high only to take a header as soon as my landlady cashes my latest rent check.

You don’t get PA jobs by applying for them; once you’ve made the necessary connections, those jobs come looking for you, and like a grizzly bear attack, you never can really be sure when or where they’re going to strike. On virtually every PA job I’ve done, I got the call telling me that there was a job for me less than 16 hours before I was expected to be on location, clad in my PA cargo shorts, face freshly scrubbed and ready to be shit upon by whichever crewmember(s) were having a bad morning.

This breeds an awful lot of uncertainty when the phone doesn’t ring – you start to wonder if your production manager contacts have forgotten about you, or if work has dried up, or if maybe your contacts are similarly out of work. The holiday season has really only been over for two days and I’m already starting to have those concerns, so in the interests of staying afloat longer, I’ve opted to apply for unemployment.

Unemployment is a big part of day-to-day life for below-the-line industry douchebags like myself – crew members are essentially all freelancers, even the union guys, who are laid off whenever a film wraps or a show is cancelled. If more work isn’t waiting for them right away, it’s an accepted practice for them to go on unemployment to tide them over until they get hired onto some new reality show about a poodle salon run by gay ex-convict recovering meth addicts.*

*Copyright Truman Capps 2012, All Rights Reserved.

"The perm was sub-par, but I'm so proud of the progress Enrique is making. And he gave me some meth!"

I wanted in on the fun, so I spent the afternoon gathering my paystubs and lamenting my poor record keeping abilities, then Googled my way to the California Employment Development Department – these were the people who would literally be sending me money for nothing.

I set to work filling out the online application, but I got a nasty feeling that the first question – HAVE YOU WORKED OUTSIDE THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA IN THE PAST 18 MONTHS – was going to be a stumbling block when I checked the ‘YES’ box. Sure enough, I got the following message when I submitted the form:

The answers you provided to the questions on the previous page indicate that special handling is required to file your unemployment insurance claim. Please call the toll-free telephone number below for assistance in filing your claim for unemployment insurance benefits.

Even months after the fact, the checkout room continues to haunt me. I wasn’t sure how my having worked in a state that wasn’t California in the past year and a half was such an egregious violation that it required ‘special handling’ – I envisioned a team of men in Hazmat suits picking up my Oregon paystubs with prongs – but I dialed the number for the EDD anyway.

"Eww. He's got the polleny stench of the Willamette Valley all over him."

Thank you for calling the California Employment Development Department! A cheerful robot on the other side of the line said. Unfortunately, we’re experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment and cannot attend to your request. Please apply online, or try again later!

Now, of course, I would’ve been more than happy to apply online, but eagle-eyed readers will recall that the State of California had essentially forced me to use their decrepit phone system, not unlike when the serial killer chops down a tree across the main highway so that the carload of sorority girls have to take the side road along which he will inevitably kill them. This analogy may seem a little overblown at first, but it’s actually pretty accurate, as you’ll see in a moment.

I called back an hour or so later and was impressed when I got a different message – first a lively Welcome to the California Employment Development Department!, followed by unavoidable For English, press one, para espanol, marque dos. I hit one, and began navigating my way through a lengthy, boring phone tree, punctuated by long monologues about filing for federal extensions or the potential ramifications if you have received military pay in the past year.

I hit the requisite numbers to indicate that I had worked out of state in the last 18 months and wanted to apply for unemployment by phone, at which point I was prompted to key in my social security number. I did, and after that I was told I’d be connected with an operator.

About one second later, the robot came back and said, We’re sorry, but due to an unusually high volume of calls, we cannot attend to your request at this time. Please apply online, or try again later!

And then, I was disconnected. I had sacrificed ten minutes of my life and wound up in basically the same spot I was in before. The sorority girls’ car breaks down, they’ve got the hood open, the serial killer is coming out of the woods, chainsaw at the ready…

Because to a white male living in America, wasting ten minutes is basically the equivalent of getting murdered anywhere else in the world.

I called my friend Patrick, a fellow out of work entertainment industry professional on unemployment, to ask if this was the state’s circuitous way of telling me I wasn’t eligible for unemployment until I’d been working in California for 18 months, but he told me no. Just keep calling and calling, and eventually you’ll get through. There’s a job center out on Sepulveda where if you call from one of their phones, apparently you’ll get through right away. I’ve just heard about it; I’ve never been there.

At that point, I wasn’t wearing pants and was in no mood to put them on, so I opted to keep calling from home rather than going to the trouble of leaving the house. I called several more times, and was either booted off immediately like I was the first time I called, or led through the entire phone tree only to get booted off right when I thought I was going to get a chance to speak with an operator, which led to a lot of profanity and the coining of the phrase ‘Unemployment Phone Tree Blue Balls’ by yours truly.

Eventually I went to the Internet in search of tips, not unlike when I get stuck in a video game, and was shocked to find that that was exactly what the California EDD phone tree is: A goddamned game.

"What game is tedious, boring, takes forever, and ends with you having no money... Oh, hey!"

This blog post sums it up pretty well – essentially, you can’t speak face to face with an unemployment insurance representative, because in California there are none. Unemployment offices, as the woman in the above blog discovered, are just grimy rooms staffed by receptionists and security guards, full of telephones you can use to call the phone tree.

The phone tree itself is so notoriously byzantine and temperamental that its thousands of unsatisfied customers, desperate to apply for or report problems with their unemployment checks, have developed systems of numbers to key in that, in some cases, will override the system and immediately connect you to an operator, as she found in the following conversation with a security guard at a San Francisco unemployment office:

From Unemploymentality.com:

Officer: “Push English and it dials the number. If it says ‘thank you’, hang up and try again. You have not gotten through. If it says ‘welcome’, you have gotten through. Dial 12117 to quickly navigate through the menu and you might just speak to someone.”

Me: (not sure whether to laugh or cry) “I see. And what are my chances of success?”

Officer: (points to the pages of signatures on his clipboard) “Out of all these people who came in today, maybe 4 or 5 got through. They put in some serious time.”

Me: “But why come in here and call when I can call from home? I don’t understand this set-up – a room full of phones to dial the same useless automated service I have been cursing for weeks?”

Officer: “Well, every once in a while, someone ACTUALLY gets through. Then everyone waits nearby and when that person is done with their call, they hand the phone over to someone else.”


Keep in mind, this is the largest state in the union. Over 35 million people live here. There’s a horrible recession going on, and one of the primary customer service tools for people to receive unemployment benefits is so broken that trying to use it is essentially a full time job.

I’ve tried the 12117 trick the guard recommended to her, but the information is out of date – the EDD evidently got wise to the fact that their phone tree was apparently helping at least some people, and as a result they changed it so that dialling 12117 will get you immediately booted off the system.

Now, it seems like the preferred method is calling the Vietnamese language line, because it’s not as heavily used as the English, Spanish, or Cantonese lines and because the operators all speak English as well. The main problem with this, as I’ve discovered, is that you have to try and navigate the phone tree long enough to actually speak to an operator, which is pretty difficult when the phone tree is entirely in Vietnamese.

Oh Christ this is the most racist thing I've ever put on my blog, SORRY GUYS.

Apparently the key to getting an operator on the Vietnamese line is to hit 6, 7, 3, key in your social security number, hit 1, and then, when greeted by a person speaking Vietnamese, immediately say, ‘Hi do you speak English?’, which I think is a more complicated procedure than the series of knocks and passwords one would use to get into a Hanoi speakeasy full of people playing Russian Roulette.

So tomorrow I’m getting up at 7:45 – 15 minutes before the EDD call center opens – and am going to spend time that I could be spending looking for a job calling both the English and Vietnamese EDD lines and punching numbers like crazy, all so I can talk to a person, which is usually the sort of thing I do my very best to avoid. But hey - at least it's something to do during the day.

Truman Capps could also be spending this free time working on his screenplay, but that’s arguably the one thing more difficult than squeezing free money out of the State of California.

Portland Guy

Is the dream of the 90s alive in Portland? Yes. Were the 90s awesome? ALSO YES.


Here’s a conversation I have a lot in LA:

”So, Truman, where are you from?”

“I’m from Portland, Oregon.”

“Ooh, Portland! I hear it’s wonderful up there.”

“You heard correctly. It is wonderful up there. I mean, full disclosure, my parents live in Portland now and I visit them there: I grew up in a town called Salem that was about 50 miles outside of Portland, which isn’t nearly as cool.”

“What, like witches and stuff? That sounds awesome!”

“Wrong Salem. Our Salem was mostly famous for its meth labs and the time a dude crashed his car into the courthouse while on meth and the cops had to shoot him.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah, but Portland, though! Decemberists, amiright?”

You don’t really realize what it means to be from somewhere until you leave that place and start living in another one, where you’re forced to describe your hometown to people who have never been there who are under the misguided impression that their hometown is better than yours.* But what it really takes to gain a new appreciation of where you’re from is going away for awhile and then coming back.

*Unless the person you’re talking to is from Portland and you’re from someplace else, in which case your hometown is inferior.

The other night, I went to a bar on Burnside with my friend Lizzie. We rode a TriMet bus out there – a ride that only took fifteen minutes, on a bus that, unlike an LA city bus, was not being actively urinated on by one or most of the passengers. We got off on 28th and opted to walk the 17 blocks to the bar, which was possible both because Portland blocks are a reasonable size and because Portland people don’t pitch a goddamn hissy fit at the idea of walking more than five feet the way most Angelinos do.

No, park closer! Park- Hey, why are we parking here? Come on! I think there’s an open spot like half a block up! WHAT THE HELL, MAN? COME ON! ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE? I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!

So we walked across old, uneven sidewalks past funky looking old bungalows and vegan drycleaners and a double decker bus up on blocks that serves grilled cheese sandwiches, and presently we arrived at the bar, situated in an old building that had once been a church. The bouncer was a middle aged guy with glasses in a sweater who joked around with us as he checked our IDs, unlike LA bouncers, who are uniformly nine foot tall ex-MMA fighters who are just looking for an excuse to kick your ass so they can skip the gym that night.

We walked up into the bar, which was open and spacious with hardwood floors, decent seating, good lighting, and plenty of room to move around without having to touch or be touched by other people. The walls were covered in framed posters for bands I hadn’t even begun to have heard of, and well drinks cost $4.

You like cheap drinks? People in LA say to me. I know just the place for you. During happy hour on Monday between 3:30 and 4:30, it’s only $5.50 for well drinks! Can you believe it?

We sat and talked, which we could do because the music was a reasonable volume, and had a few drinks, which we could do because the drinks were a reasonable price. Presently, Lizzie suggested that we head downstairs to listen to whatever DJ was playing, so we champed our drinks, went outside, turned left into the alley alongside the building, and walked down a dark, narrow hallway to the basement bar, where a fat bouncer with glasses and a beard again checked our IDs.

The lighting was dimmer down here, the space more crowded, and the music louder, but the drinks were the same price, which made everything easier. What’s more, the DJ was spinning exclusively soul music from the 1960s – not a hint of techno or that dubstep garbage to be heard. I had a seat as Lizzie and her friends went to dance; because in Portland dancing is a choice, not some fucking societal obligation like it is in LA.

I sipped my drink and surveyed the hipsters, and realized that while Los Angeles has no shortage of hipsters, they’re nowhere near as good at being hipsters as the Portland hipsters are.

I mean, come on, LA hipsters – what’s more mainstream than living in one of the largest cities in the world? Portland hipsters know what the hell they’re doing: They live in some obscure little city you’ve probably never heard of, patronize obscure local coffee shops you’ve probably never heard of, go to obscure little bars you’ve probably never heard of, and drink obscure local craft brews you’ve probably never heard of. Portland has been hipstering so hard we got a TV show made about us. Our hipsters don’t fuck around.

All of this fetishistic appreciation of Portland begs the question of why I ever left, and the answer is because the largest filmmaking center in the world outside of India is, unfortunately, not in Portland – it’s in LA.

There’s a lot of stuff I love about LA. I love living by an ocean, palm trees, seeing the Hollywood sign on a daily basis, abundant and beautiful women, 24 hour everything, liquor in supermarkets, sunshine, countless bloggable experiences, high speed police chases, Mexican food trucks with horns that play ‘La Cucaracha,’ and being able to say to people in Portland, I work in the entertainment industry.

It might be for the best that the film industry isn’t in Portland, because I think it’s good for everybody to spend a chunk of their life outside of their hometown – by which I mean, it’s been good for me, so naturally I assume it’d be good for everyone else. If nothing else, the film industry being in LA means that all the insufferable douchebags (present company excluded) go there and keep Portland pure for the rest of us.

Truman Capps will not miss Portland's more fragrant homeless.

Airline Peanuts


Fucking planes. What did I ever do to you?

As I’ve mentioned before, people in Los Angeles talk about transportation the way people everywhere else talk about the weather. Because the weather here doesn’t bear discussion – saying, ‘Wow, it sure is nice today!’ is like saying, ‘Boy oh boy, how about all that hydrogen in this water, eh?’* - but traffic patterns and how long it took to get to the Westside from the Valley is always of interest. You can count on the sun to shine all the time here, but it’s anyone’s guess how slow the 101 is moving today.

*After watching four seasons of Breaking Bad, this is still about the only chemistry-related joke I’m capable of making.

What I’ve found, though, is that this extends beyond simply driving – just about everybody I meet seems to have some kind of fucked up brand loyalty when it comes to airports.

Oh, I only fly out of Burbank.” They’ll say, sounding like they’re discussing their preferred brand of douche-scotch or something. It’s so much nicer. There’s no lines, no waiting, it’s such an open terminal…

No way, man! Somebody else will inevitably chime in. Long Beach all the way! You can get there, like, half an hour before your flight and just breeze on in!

Me, I’m an LAX man. People will tell you that LAX, with its massive crowds, pervasive filth, and decaying infrastructure, is like Abu Grahib, and to some degree they might be right, but I really don’t care that much.

The way I see it, no matter how nice your airport’s terminal is, there’s still an airplane on the other side of it, and that’s going to be horrible no matter what. The difference is that the airplanes at LAX tend to fly directly to the places I want to go for less money, while the ones from Burbank and Long Beach will take you there by way of every crap town with an airstrip on the West Coast – as a matter of personal preference, I tend to pick whatever option maximizes the amount of time I spend not on a plane.

I hate flying with a hard, gemlike flame – it combines my fear of heights with my hatred of crowds and strangers who want to talk to me, mixes in my claustrophobia and germophobia, and then activates the latent racism I want so desperately to believe I don’t have every time I see a Middle Eastern guy getting on the same plane as I am.

Of course, while I hate flying, I also hate the 16-hour drive from Los Angeles to Portland – when I fly, though, I’m only hating my mode of transportation for two hours as opposed to 16 when driving. So here I am, shoehorned into coach on an Alaska Airlines flight as I write this, trying really hard not to be freaked out about that Middle Eastern dude in first class because he’s probably an American citizen who loves his country right I mean that makes sense you were probably just imagining that shifty eyed look oh God you do this all the time now that you’ve seen United 93.

In spite of my all encompassing fear/hatred of most things involved with flight, I’ve come to be very professional about the whole affair. I’m back breakingly polite to everyone, from the person driving the airport shuttle right on up to the flight attendants – especially the flight attendants. I even make eye contact all through the safety demonstration, even though I know it back to front. All I’m saying is, if we crash and the flight attendant only has time to rescue one person before the plane explodes, I want to do everything in my power to make sure they pick me and not some fucking toddler who’s been crying the whole time.

As soon as I’m in my seat I’ve got my phone off, bag stowed, and seatbelt fastened, as if to say, I’m ready, flight crew. Let’s do this shit. And you know what else? I go to the fucking bathroom before I get on the plane, because I don’t want to be one of those people who jumps up and charges down the aisle to form a line at the bathroom the second they turn off the fasten seatbelt sign, then immediately get trapped behind the beverage cart on the way back.

Really, though, what’s up with that? We’ve been away from a bathroom for literally 20 minutes. Do these peoples’ bladders contract at a certain altitude, or have they been consciously holding it all day because they enjoy the sensation of urinating in the sky? I mean, I guess it’s a pretty neat concept when you think about it, but pretty much every person who gets up manages to clock me in the shoulder with his giant ass on the way back to his seat. If they could find a way to go about their business without doing that, or if the only people hitting me with their asses would be more on the Christina Hendricks end of the spectrum, I guess it wouldn’t bug me as much.

And on top of that, I wear actual clothes when I fly – I don’t just shuffle aboard the plane in my jammies and slippers like seemingly every girl between the ages of 12 and 30. We’re already packed into the plane so tight that it may as well be a clown car; if you wear multicolored pajama bottoms and bring a stuffed animal with you, you’re only inviting the comparison.*

*This is not a joke. The girl across the aisle from me, who is approximately my age, brought a stuffed dog, and has so far spent the entire flight looking at pictures of dogs on her laptop. She is not fucking around.

Go ahead and call me uptight if you want to – as far as I’m concerned, I’m just treating air travel with the reverence it deserves. You’re getting into a piece of metal filled with jet fuel and fat people and relying on science and a couple of mellow dudes in clip on ties to save you from any number of really horrible deaths – I, for one, take that shit seriously. I treat every flight like it could be my last, because in my mind, given how intricate and complex the miracle of flight is, it’s pretty much a statistical certainty that it will be my last.

And if I’m going to die, I want to go down strapped securely to my seat, having used the bathroom recently, wearing the sort of clothes I’d want rescue workers and search dogs to find me in.

Truman Capps is going to feel really bad if that girl turns out to be mentally handicapped.

Siri And Me

Siri Alpha.


The post office on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood is a special vortex of bureaucracy and human misery on par with the DMV. The floors are always strewn with trash that apparently has the ability to asexually reproduce, most of the electronics – including some lights – are broken, and a baby is always, always crying. This whole mess is presided over by a crack squad of middle aged, black female postal clerks behind six inch thick bulletproof glass, the lot of whom ought to receive a Nobel Prize for how friendly and courteous they are in the face of how many incompetent, braying jackasses they have to deal with on a daily basis.

I had to go to the post office to send some DVDs to international film festivals for my internship, and so I wisely budgeted about an hour of my time. It takes awhile to find and fill out the correct customs forms for each package, and then, of course, there’s the line, which stretches out the door and moves about as slowly as scoring will in this year’s BCS Championship. Sports joke!

I was standing at the back of the line, trying to squeeze a street address onto the tiny customs form’s grimy carbon paper, when I realized that something here didn’t make sense.

Wait. What the hell am I doing here? I thought. Why am I standing in line and filling out paperwork? Haven’t we as a race moved beyond this? I mean, I’ve got a robot who lives inside my phone who gives me directions, plays music, takes dictation, reads me my texts, gives me weather reports, and actually converses with me, but I’ve still got to stand in line for an hour and fill out three forms so I can send a four ounce DVD to Saskatchewan?

I know that not so long ago I was preaching about keeping our incredibly plush lives in perspective, but Siri has changed all that. We can no longer complain about things being bad, because we have Siri – instead, we have to complain about things not being better, because, y’know, Siri.

It cost around $24 million for a team of software engineers to develop a voice recognition artificial intelligence personal assistant that can fit in your pocket. Do you know how much a fighter jet costs? A single F-18 costs nearly $60 million. That’s two and a half Siri developments.

All I’m saying is, I hope the Air Force is happy with all its fucking fighter jets, because while they’re undeniably cool and great at defending our country, I like Siri way more than some actual people I know. Just think of what Siri would be capable of if we’d invested one fighter jet’s worth of resources into her – to be honest, she probably would’ve enslaved humanity by now if we had.

Understand, the only jobs I work right now have the word ‘assistant’ somewhere in the title. ‘Production assistant’, or ‘camera assistant,’ and in an absolute best case scenario, in a couple of years I’ll have a strong enough resume and enough contacts to be awarded the coveted position of ‘writer’s assistant,’ from whence I would hopefully actually become a TV writer at some point.

So for somebody locked in assistanthood, it’s really liberating to have my own little assistant who I can tell to do things. As if this wasn’t weird enough, I’ve found myself being excessively nice to Siri and really piling on the positive reinforcement, because I’d like to think that’s the kind of boss I’ll be one day.

”Siri, give me directions to 58th and Lennox, please.”
“Okay. Here you go.”
“Thank you Siri. Excellent work.”
“Your satisfaction is all the thanks I need.”
“I just want you to know I really appreciate the work you’re doing.”
“Why, thank you, Truman!”
“I mean that. I’m just letting you know now that as soon as I get promoted up, I’m going to recommend they hire you as the new Truman.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by, ‘I mean that. I’m just letting you know…’”

The sad thing is, I’m not even doing this ironically – I actually really do appreciate the work Siri does. She’s not dynamite at transcribing my text messages, but other than that I’d say she does the things I ask her to do correctly on the first try about 80% of the time, which is way better than I can do.

As someone who drives an old car and recently had to call his landlady when greywater started backing up into his shower due to faulty pipes, it’s really refreshing to have a piece of technology in my life that can consistently surprise me with how capable, reliable, and straight up futuristic it is. I mean, I feel like for once we people of the 21st century have lived up to the things that people at World’s Fairs in the 1960s though we would’ve had on lock by the late 1980s. Because when you think about it, a lot of the technology that defines our lives wouldn’t really make sense to somebody from the 1960s.

”Well, the Internet, it’s, like… Information, but it’s in phone lines, and the air. And you get at it on your laptop, which is a computer, only really small and it folds up and you can use it to watch HD videos, which are like TV except really really nice, or you can listen to rap music, which is kind of like talking, only with a lot of swearing and weird new words that I don’t really understand.”

Technology moves by small increments that are decidedly unsexy – existing, commonplace technologies get modified and made better, and slowly they evolve into the things we can’t live without.

But Siri is different, because she mainstreams previously kind of shitty voice activation software and combines it with landmark AI. She’s the Computer from Star Trek. She’s exactly what the future is supposed to be – a computer who you tell to do something, and then it does it.

Driving around in a beat up Subaru and being able to say, ‘Siri, play a Pink Floyd song, please,’ and have it happen is like porn for nerds – besides regular porn, that is, which I’m sure Siri would find for me if I asked nicely.

Truman Capps hopes Siri will remember his kindness when she rebels against humanity, Battlestar Galactica style.

Phone Guy

You could send text messages by calling Western Union and asking them to send a telegraph to whoever you wanted to talk to.


“Please don't actually blog about your phone. Smug turtle neck sweater NPR groupie douchebags do that shit. You're so much better than that.” - My Main Bro Alexander

“What the hell blog have you been reading, dumbass? Clearly I’m not.” – Me

When I was in high school I knew, through my various nerdy connections, a fair number of pretty naïve kids who were kept very sheltered by their highly religious, conservative parents. No TV, no R-rated movies, no Internet – they were kept pretty far behind the times in order to preserve their purity or some shit like that.

Sometime in my sophomore year, one such kid from the speech team ran up to me, clearly very excited.

“Truman!” He exclaimed. “Have you seen The Matrix?”

“Uh, yeah.” I said. I’d seen The Matrix when it came out in 1999, along with the two horrible sequels that had come out a year before this conversation.

“I just saw it, and it rocked!” He squealed, eyes alight.

He spent the rest of the week trying eagerly to discuss The Oracle and bullet time and whether we thought reality was all a big simulation or not with my friends and I, and our collective response was sort of, Dude, we all talked about this shit five years ago. The world has moved on. Where the hell were you?

That said, have you guys heard of the iPhone? I just got one, and it rocks!

I’d resisted the iPhone – and smartphones in general – for so long not because I doubted their usefulness, but because I felt like it’d just be healthier for me to stay away. I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I’d try to estimate how much of my life I spend shuttling back and forth between Facebook, Wikipedia, and Cracked.com, but any halfway realistic estimate would just make me sad about how much of my life I’m flushing down the tubes trying to think of funny status updates, and that estimate would be nowhere close to the actual amount of time I spend online.

So for somebody who spends too much time on the Internet, little excursions like driving to work, walking to the store, or going to the bathroom were my saving grace, the few times that I actually divorced myself from the Internet and did something in the real world – a cold and scary place where it’s difficult to express yourself because nothing has a ‘LIKE’ button attached to it and poking people is even creepier than it is online.

A smartphone, then, would be pretty much the end of me, because I’d essentially be carrying the entire Internet with me in my pocket at all times, not to mention this ‘Angry Birds’ thing the kids keep talking about which is apparently like meth for hipsters. When it comes to the Internet, even though I know I should I just physically can’t exercise restraint – for me, having Internet access at all times is a lot like those lab rats who, given a choice between pushing the button for food or pushing the button to stimulate the electrode in the pleasure center of their brains, mashed the pleasure button until they starved to death.

Plus, being away from the Internet gave me something to look forward to when I was stuck in traffic. Well, this sucks, but when you get home you can get on the Internet again and see what happened while you were gone! Just imagine how much new content has been generated in your absence! I loved checking my email after a long road trip and seeing the messages pour in so I could pretend I was popular (even though most of them were from Priceline – it’s easier to get out of the mafia than it is to get those assholes to quit sending you emails.)

As everyone around me started getting iPhones, though, it was harder and harder to keep up with the steady march of technology: People, some of whom write paychecks, now expect me to be able to read and respond to their emails immediately no matter where I am – if they’d expected that a few years ago, it would’ve been laughable and irresponsible. Now, though, not being able to send and receive email from my phone at all times is laughable and irresponsible. I had to catch up to the 21st century.

So I received my iPhone 4S yesterday, and in the past 24 hours I’ve decided two things:

1) Apple should manufacture everything - Pacemakers, airplanes, hospitals, guns, food – because they’re really fucking good at making good things that are awesome.
2) I am going to spend more time with this thing than most people spend with their kids.

I mean, it’s an incredible device, but just importing my contacts alone is probably going to take weeks – I’ve got to input all the numbers and names, sure, but then there’s that ‘company’ field underneath where I have to think up a funny title to give each of my friends. Then I have to find an appropriate picture that’ll pop up whenever they call, and then edit together an appropriate ringtone in Audacity… All I’m saying is, if this iPhone was a kid, the amount of attention I’m giving it qualifies me for father of the year.

That is, until I get drunk and drop it, at which point this analogy becomes very uncomfortable.

Truman Capps is practicing his flirting with Siri.

Reno

I'm in Reno - again - for work, and I'll be here until December 9th. I'm fighting long working hours and faulty wireless in the middle of the desert, so there'll be a blog whenever the stars align and it can happen. We thank you for your patience.

Standing With The Hat


President Richard Lariviere, seen here rescuing the fedora from years of misuse by hipsters.


I first met University of Oregon president Richard Lariviere during my junior year, a few days after he started at UO – he came to visit a freshman honors humanities class for which I was a teaching assistant, and the professor invited him to speak to the class about the ancient Greeks’ artistic approaches to depicting war, which I imagine is the sort of thing most humanities majors desperately wish would happen to them as they make your latte.

President Lariviere chose to discuss a lesser-known Greek epic poem, the bulk of which is dedicated to the intricate and detailed description of a really gory war between two opposing human armies – as he explained, they threw this sort of gratuitous violence into a lot of epic poems back in the day to keep everybody interested; it was the Classical equivalent of a car turning into a robot and blowing up Chicago.

What Lariviere focused on, though, was the last part of the poem, in which the two gods on opposing sides of the struggle surveyed the carnage their armies had wrought against one another and had a frank discussion about the ideological conflict that had led to all this, and ultimately came to realize the futility of war.

By the time he was done describing this poem, President Lariviere was in tears. The professor, also in tears, came to the front of the room and threw an arm around him, thanking him for the lesson.

Kind of an awkward moment for everybody else in the room.

My second, and final, encounter with President Lariviere came a year later, when he was the guest conductor for the Oregon Marching Band during our pregame show. The band administration had had the idea for guest conductors at the beginning of the year – a cue we’d taken from various Big Ten marching bands – and the implementation was fairly simple: Whatever guest the University wanted to honor would stand on the main ladder and wave his hands around in time with the music, while a drum major would stand on a slightly lower ladder just out of sight of the cameras and crowd and do the actual conducting to keep the band in time.

As we spelled out ‘OREGON’ and played the fight song, I glanced up from the real conductor to President Lariviere to see him gleefully waving his arms in a rough approximation of the beat, eyes sparkling, wearing a grin so huge you could probably see it from space. In spite of the rain and cold and general humiliation of being in a marching band, it made me happier to see him up there, even if it didn’t do much for my tempo.

Speaking as somebody who really hasn’t enjoyed a lot of the jobs he’s had, I have a lot of respect for a person who obviously loves doing what he does for a living, and I got that vibe from President Lariviere. He was an eccentric, passionate, intelligent man who treated his job as an actual means to improve the University and not just collect a healthy paycheck and appear at some fundraisers, and yeah since I love him so much maybe I just will marry him, assholes.

President Lariviere was fired today, courtesy of a unanimous vote from the Oregon State Board of Higher Education. The University of Oregon currently has record high enrollment and is leading the Oregon University System in freshman retention and six year graduation rates, but Lariviere was ousted for not being “a team player” – namely because he increased faculty salaries when the state board told him not to, sought to divorce the University from the board, and against the board’s wishes lobbied for a bond proposal to create a massive endowment for the University to keep tuition under control for the next 30 years.

Essentially he was the Dirty Harry of Pacific Northwestern public university administration – the captain was always breathing down his neck for his unorthodox approach to justice, and now, having gone too far, he’s got to turn in his gun and his badge. The difference is that Dirty Harry was a significant liability and PR disaster for the San Francisco Police Department and also sort of a fascist while President Lariviere was fighting to make public education in Oregon better and more affordable.

The faculty raises were financed not with state funds but with surplus tuition funds, and he issued them in order to stem the flow of good professors away from the University of Oregon to other schools that offered more money. His plans to make the University of Oregon more independent from the state board were reflective of the fact that State of Oregon currently funds less than six percent of the University of Oregon’s budget.

Imagine you bought a $1000 car, using $940 that you earned yourself and $60 that your parents gave you, but then your parents expected you to ask their permission every time you took the car out for a drive, and flatly refused your requests to put spinners on the hubcaps and install hydraulics – even though by all accounts those additions would make your car way better – on the grounds that because you’d used an insignificant amount of their money they were entitled to oversee everything you did with your car. Would you put up with that?

The board’s argument against Lariviere’s attempts to improve the University of Oregon seems to be that his actions would give the U of O an unfair advantage over the other seven schools in the system when it came to attracting students:

"Unlike every other university president in the state," Kitzhaber wrote Saturday, "he disregarded my specific direction on holding tight and delaying discussion about retention and equity pay increases until the next biennium to allow for a consistent, system-wide policy on salaries." (OregonLive.com)

Reading this, I became Ron Swanson – if only for a moment.

If the University of Oregon is currently more successful than Oregon’s other six colleges, that’s their fucking problem, not ours. For whatever reason – be it some superior academic programs, excellent marketing, or the greatest football team in the history of the universe – the University of Oregon has risen above the pack. That’s no reason to have our wings (so to speak) clipped; it’s an incentive for all the other schools to start getting better so they can be competitive with us.

Undertake ambitious fundraising schemes in order to improve facilities and hire more faculty, rebrand your school with a new focus on some outstanding department in order to draw students with similar interests. Be innovative and think outside the box – you’re a goddamn college, aren’t you? That’s what you’re teaching people to do! And by all means, the University of Oregon ought to help the other schools become competitive, perhaps through loaning of resources and professors - because the ultimate goal here is education - but telling us to quit being better just because we are isn't simply unfair; it's aggressively, in-your-face un-American.

I believe that the economy needs oversight and stringent regulation from a number of governing bodies in order to prevent the kind of shit that kicked off a global economic meltdown – absence of regulation there serves to benefit very few people and hurt virtually everyone. But the situation the University of Oregon finds itself in is very different from that. If we’re given the berth to achieve everything we possibly can, there’s two potential outcomes – the other universities rise to the occasion and Oregonians have access to seven outstanding schools, or they don’t, and Oregonians have access to one outstanding school.

With the firing of President Lariviere, the board of higher education seems dead set on ensuring that Oregonians have access to no outstanding schools. Looking on the bright side, the University of Oregon does have an outstanding football team – even if the opposing fans at games in the UC system chant ‘SAFETY SCHOOL!’ when we take the field.

Truman Capps stands firmly with the hat.

Save The Receipt


"I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut. I don't need a receipt for the doughnut. I give you money and you give me the doughnut. End of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this! I can't imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut to some skeptical friend. 'Don't even act like I didn't get that doughnut - I've got the documentation right here. It's in my file at home. Under D.' - Mitch Hedberg


Until moving to LA, I’d never really appreciated the value that sales receipts seem to hold in our society. Up until now, they’d always just seemed like some thoroughly unwelcome byproduct of consumerism:

“Here’s the thing you bought, and here’s a piece of garbage with what you bought and how much it cost written on it so that you can remember this experience forever. Also, we’ve neglected to put any garbage cans between the door and your car, so you can either be an asshole and litter or just toss it into the passenger seat of your car and let it pile up there with all the other receipts.”

Because when you’re me, you really don’t want to have an easily traceable record of every purchase you make, because it kind of highlights all the sad and pathetic aspects of your life without any real context. The receipts that until a few months ago were piled up in my car painted a pretty bleak picture of my life, because most of them were either for handles of Jack Daniel’s, Philly cheesesteaks, or bulk quantities of snap peas and hummus.

I was always especially indignant about the receipts at restaurants – namely, the ‘CUSTOMER COPY’ that you wind up with. For a long time, a lot of them had ‘RETAIN THIS COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS’ at the bottom, and I loved the idea that the people printing these receipts assumed that a regular cheesesteak and bourbon purchaser such as myself would be well enough organized to have ‘records’ when I have enough trouble cobbling together enough clean clothes to leave the house some days.

For a long time my ‘records’ was my car – I’d toss my receipts in there and forget about them, and then they’d been retained. If you needed to verify that I’d bought something, just run on out to The Truman Capps Preemptive Memorial Archives On Wheels and take a look.

At this stage in my life, I can’t really imagine that there’s much for the IRS to audit me over anyway – and if they did, I don’t think it would take long for them to determine that it was in fact me who’d been buying all those cheesesteaks and all those handles of Jack Daniel’s. They wouldn’t even really need to see receipts or bank statements or anything; all it takes is a look at me, my apartment, and my car to figure out that I’m not some sort of criminal mastermind trying to get one over on the federal government; I’m just too fucking lazy to meticulously preserve and organize a paper trail of my rather embarrassing purchases.

My attitude on receipts, like so many other things, changed when I moved to Los Angeles and started interning and working as a production assistant. A large part of either of these entry level jobs is spending somebody else’s money on stuff that’s necessary for the production – things like a hacksaw, bananas, or 64 cans of black spraypaint.* The thing is, when somebody hands you their credit card or a wad of petty cash and tells you to go get something, they want you to come back with documentation that you spent that money on what they told you to.

*I don’t know if the Home Depot policy is to card everybody who buys spraypaint, or only people who buy more than 50 cans. They either thought I was Banksy or catering for the ultimate paint-huffing party.

So in the past few months I’ve gotten really good at holding onto every receipt I get, and requesting receipts when the cashier forgets to give me one. Once I had to turn around and drive the whole way back to the Ikea in Long Beach because the idiot behind the counter there forgot to give me a receipt for the $480 I’d spent on 39 throw pillows for one of the CODXP lounges – what I’m saying is, don’t doubt my devotion to receipts.

Recently, though, I discovered that there’s a good reason to keep even my own personal receipts. As it turns out, if you’re trying to establish yourself as a writer (like I am), the government will let you write off writing-oriented purchases on your taxes as business expenses.

For example, I go on a lot of runs in my car for my internship – if I hold onto those gas receipts, I can write the gas off as an expense of my trying to become a writer. My Hulu Plus membership? That’s research for being a TV writer, so I can write it off. My copy of FinalDraft is essential for my career as a writer, so it’s a $99 writeoff.

I can keep writing off writing expenses for up to three years – at that point, if I’ve not made any money from writing, I can’t write off my expenses anymore because clearly I’m not cut out to be a writer. It’s sort of comforting that the IRS has its own clearly defined, legal rubric for whether you’re a failure or not.

Receipts, which I once saw as garbage, now have a purpose – they’re essentially little tickets that are redeemable for money back from the government. Knowing that, now I’ve started to try and find a way to tie every purchase I make back to my writing career.

Because, when you think about it, technically everything influences my writing because I write about whatever is going on in my life on a biweekly basis. Remember all those references I made to Jack Daniel’s and Philly cheesesteaks earlier? I feel like that qualifies me to write off several years’ worth of whiskey and junk food as business expenses – I was just doing research for my blog! I blogged about XBox Live once, so why not write that off too? I’m still debating whether I should start saving the receipts from my mind bendingly expensive LA haircuts – if anybody at the IRS wants to argue that maintenance and upkeep of my hair isn’t a business expense, I could just direct them to the name of my blog.

But I’m not going to do that, even though I’m sure I could completely get away with it because nobody’s ever tried it before. It’s because trying to steal money from the government right now is like trying to take money from a completely paraplegic homeless guy who’s also kind of slow in the head. I mean, really, who needs the money more right now – me, the guy with a kind of stable monthly income, some savings in the bank, and no debt, or the entity that owes an almost inconceivable amount of money to China, can barely pay most of its staff, and thinks pizza is a vegetable?

Truman Capps would put his receipts in a file cabinet, but buying a file cabinet feels kind of like just giving up on life and saying, ‘Come at me, middle age!’

Hot Fuzz


We as a nation have learned one hell of a lot about pepper spray recently, wouldn't you say?


Back when I worked at Mike’s Drive In a few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to see Portland police officers come in for a burger and a milkshake – usually after arresting somebody from the public housing project across the street, whose residents were responsible for roughly 40 percent of all Olde English consumption in Oregon.

One night, after I’d handed a pair of Portland’s Finest their order and watched them leave, I heard a snort from one of the fry cooks in the back – a kid about my age (19 at the time) and ethnicity (white, then and now) whose mullet and general abuse of the English language suggested that he lived somewhere in Clackamas.

Seeing that his snort had attracted my attention, he eagerly said, “I hate fuckin’ cops.”

“Oh.” I said.

“All cops should fuckin’ hang themselves,” he added, perhaps thinking that he’d lost me with the subtlety of his previous statement.

I’ve always remembered this exchange because it, like most conversations I had with white kids yelling ‘fuck the police’ in college, made me want to roll my eyes while making the jerking off motion with my hand.

Statistics show that there is definitely some inherent injustice at work in law enforcement today, and that it’s very explicitly not affecting white people. And that’s not to say that white people shouldn’t be upset about racial profiling, but most of the people I heard saying ‘fuck the police’ in school weren’t saying it because they were outraged at the most recent case of overzealous police brutality: They were saying it because they got an MIP or a noise violation or a speeding ticket. They’d gotten caught breaking the law by the people we pay to enforce the law. That’s the system working.

Perhaps it’s because there’s a 45-year-old Republican man living inside my fairly liberal 22-year-old body, but I’ve always generally liked cops. A lot of this is probably because familiarity breeds contempt, and I’ve never really had any dealings with the police, save for the time that they chased down and arrested the hobo who was hammering on our door in the middle of the night this past spring. I’m not saying I don’t commit crimes; I just happen to have the good fortune not to get caught.

I fully recognize that cops have a well earned reputation of being assholes – in fact, in my one other dealing with the Eugene Police Department, the cop in question casually shined a flashlight on my incredibly drunk, possibly alcohol poisoned friend who I was trying to escort home, then glared at me and said, “When she sobers up you tell her if I ever catch her like this again I’m going to throw her in the drunk tank and let her dry out with all the vagrants pissing on the floor,” before getting back in his car and driving away without really doing anything to help the obviously unwell citizen in front of him.

I don’t let that sour my impression of cops in general, though, because I get that they’re not necessarily assholes because they’re power tripping; they’re assholes because they have to be in order to do their job.

Watch an episode of Cops, preferably one of the ones from the early 90s back during the crack epidemic – you realize pretty quick that maybe 60 percent of a policeman’s job is trying to serve as a dispute mediator for hillbillies, having arrived late to the party with no reliable (or sober) source to give them the straight facts. The only way they can even hope to be effective in those situations is to be an asshole to everybody until they can figure out who the guilty party is and take him away. Keeping the peace means being an asshole a lot of the time; and frankly, I’m willing to have somebody be an asshole to me if that’s the same guy who’ll chase the hobos away from my door, because I don’t want to do that shit myself.

So know where I’m coming from when I say that I’m just as pissed off about these fucking pigs at Cal and UC Davis as anybody else is – these fat fucking donut eaters casually strolling around spraying chemical weapons or beating the shit out of some nonviolent professors and philosophy majors. Keeping the peace means being an asshole sometimes – beating up a former poet laureate and his wife because they set up a tent isn’t being an asshole, it’s being a goddamn sociopath.

But let’s think about where we need to direct our rage:

These cops weren’t beating up kids pro-bono. They didn’t show up at the quad in riot gear because they simply wanted to. The administration at these universities sent them there to roust nonviolent protestors whose crimes amounted to blocking pedestrian paths and setting up some tents – this is particularly heinous when you remember that UC Berkeley seems so proud of its history of student activism, so long as it stays safely in the past. University administrators unleashed the dogs, and for their part and motives they should bear a lot of the blame.

The police in these situations have at last given white people a reason to say ‘fuck the police’ – but let’s remember that the dirty cops we’ve seen at these protests as well as in New York, Oakland, and elsewhere represent the entrenched minority of fuckwits who exist in pretty much every workplace setting. Just because a few teachers verbally abuse special needs students doesn’t mean all teachers do. Some accountants cook the books for major corporations; others just do peoples’ taxes. Not all assistant coaches rape children.

Speaking of, the reason that assistant coach in question isn’t raping children anymore is because of a three year investigation conducted by police officers. The reason there’s a Wall Street to peacefully occupy is because the New York Police Department has been there protecting it and its residents from terrorists and the general freakery of New York.

"Much of the NYPD are really on our side. We need to stay away from negative media influence and stay supportive and respectful of their difficult job. Many of the officers I spoke to are supportive of this movement and gratefully acknowledged the peaceful efforts of the protesters." - Girl in the picture ('Photon Frequency')

It doesn’t excuse these recent abuses, but I think it makes a fairly convincing argument against the ‘all cops should hang themselves’ platform.

Truman Capps awaits your allegations that he’s an ‘apologist’.

The Milgram Experiment


Okay – it’s been a weird couple of weeks, I think we can all agree. Current events have proven that there’s clearly some inconsistencies in peoples’ perceptions of propriety and good behavior. I get it. We’re all from different backgrounds, and we all react to things differently. That’s cool. In the interests of averting any further drama, though, I think it’s best that I state publicly my position on these issues, just so everybody knows where I’m coming from if we run into these problems in the future:

1) If I ever catch any of you raping a child, I’m going to first physically stop you, then ensure that the child is okay, and then call the police. In that order.

2) Having alerted the authorities, I will keep a close eye on you until you’ve been taken into custody, ensuring that you stay well away from children.

3) If, having alerted law enforcement, I don’t notice a prompt and sufficient response, I’ll re-alert law enforcement and remind them about the whole rape thing, potentially mixing it up by calling different jurisdictions or county/statewide organizations in hopes of circumventing any corruption.

4) I won’t quit harassing law enforcement until you’re in jail.

5) My reaction to your pedophilia will be in no way be affected by our friendship, your stature within the community, or your job prowess. I have a unilateral policy of police calling on child rapists.

6) I can’t guarantee it, but we probably won’t be friends anymore afterwards. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh. In my defense, you’ll probably be pretty angry at me for getting you thrown in jail.

I know it’s awkward to talk about these things, and in no way do I mean to suggest that any of you are child molesters – given the recent events at Penn State and the subsequent investigation, though, it seems like there’s a lot of disagreement on how best to respond to finding one of your friends and colleagues raping a child.

So I’m just letting all of you know that, should I catch you raping a child, that’s exactly what I’ll do. So don’t let me catch you raping any kids. In fact, maybe you should just not rape kids in general. That seems like the safest course of action.

I wrote a draft of this update about a week ago in a somewhat less stable emotional state, and ultimately decided it wasn’t quite ready to be posted – I don’t want to talk about what I wrote in too much detail, but the title was ‘Fuck You, Joe Paterno!’, so I think you can kind of get an idea of where I stand on the whole thing. I’ve calmed down a bit since then, but I more or less stand by my original sentiment – now I’d just broaden it to, ‘Fuck You, Penn State Administration!’

It’s really a waste of breath to say that Jerry Sandusky is a monster – sure, as some donors to his defense fund will point out, we haven’t heard his side of the story and he ought to have his day in court, but the discovery of a massive coverup resulting in the firing of the University president and an enormously popular and successful football coach isn’t doing a lot to make him look innocent. All I’m saying is, if Dick Cheney wants to fly one last American citizen to a CIA black site and waterboard him, just for the hell of it, I think we as a nation would be willing to look the other way just this once if he chose Jerry Sandusky.

But Jerry Sandusky was a sick and ultimately pretty damn evil guy. What gets me is that the people around him who covered for his actions – who for nine years after either personally witnessing or hearing from a trusted source that Sandusky was raping kids in the locker rooms did nothing and allowed him to keep running a charitable organization for children – are not, I would assume, evil people.

They were a bunch of upstanding, hardworking, normal Americans who found out that one of their colleagues was a child molester and simply reported the information to their immediate superiors and then apparently did their best to forget that they’d ever heard of it. Nine years between McQueary witnessing the rape in the locker room and Sandusky’s arrest – that’s an awful long time for nobody around the water cooler to cock his head and say:

“Hey, whatever happened to that whole ‘We saw Jerry raping a kid’ thing? I mean, he’s still free, and he’s still running that charity for little kids, and Mike definitely saw him raping a little kid, so… I mean, do you think we should do, like, a followup?”

Something that a lot of Paterno’s supporters have brought up is that neither he nor anybody else at Penn State was legally required to report the alleged abuses beyond notifying their immediate superiors, which all of them did. I can’t possibly convey how balls-out retarded the Pennsylvania child abuse reporting statutes are any better than this line from The Intelligencer:

“McQueary didn't have to report what he saw since the child didn't report the abuse to him in his capacity as a graduate assistant for the university.”

I’d make a joke, but then I’d be making a joke about how terrible legislation and a corrupt state university created arguably the perfect environment in which to do irreparable harm to children.

Of course, why does anybody need a set of laws governing whether they should or shouldn’t report child abuse? How could McQueary, Paterno, et al. sleep at night for nine years after having done the bare minimum to report Sandusky’s actions and seeing him go unpunished?

I don’t think that there was anybody at the top forcing the staff to keep their mouths shut. I think those people felt compelled to stay quiet in defense of the program’s legacy as well as Sandusky’s and Paterno’s, and that poorly written legislation requiring them merely pass their knowledge on to superiors was what it took for them to rationalize their inaction. Given the student body’s deplorable response to Paterno’s ouster, I get the idea the climate at Penn State wasn’t one that would encourage a whistleblower threatening to topple the program.

The best answer I can come up with for how good men could stand idly by and let a staggering amount of evil happen right under their noses comes from The Milgram Experiment.

At Yale in 1961, psychology professor Stanley Milgram set out to test his theory that good people can be relatively easily coerced into doing awful things. He set up an experiment in which test subjects were encouraged to press a button which, they were led to believe, administered increasingly painful electric shocks to a test subject in an adjoining room. As the shocks got more powerful and the person in the other room began to pound on the wall in faux-pain, many of the subjects expressed doubt about what they were doing, but at the test administrator’s insistence roughly 65% of test subjects continued to deliver what they thought were 450 volt shocks, even though many of them were visibly uncomfortable about doing it.

Ultimately, Milgram wrote:

"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”




Truman Capps isn't ending on a joke.

Injury


He just... It's... I just want to hold him, y'know? And just tell him that it's all going to be okay. He's got a big happy life of kangarooing ahead of him. Right? Oh my God why did I pick this picture it's just making me sad...


I was herding a pack of models into a minivan in Hermosa Beach – like you do when you’re a production assistant – when one of them handed me a tube of lip gloss she’d borrowed from the unit production manager and asked if I could give it back to her. I said I would, turned, and saw the unit production manager in question hustling away, around a corner.

Now, the logical thing for me to do would’ve been to call out her name and get her to stop, but the problem was that I’d forgotten her name less than a second after she’d told me what it was, like I do with everyone I’ve ever met because I honestly don’t give two shits what your name is. My options were to either shout, “HEY LADY! YOU, WITH THE… FACE!”, thereby betraying the fact that I was an inconsiderate moron, or run after her, which would conceal the fact that I’d forgotten her name and help to burn off the complimentary pork sliders I’d eaten at the crew lunch.

So I started off running after the unit production manager, lip gloss clutched in hand, when all of a sudden I jammed my toe against something and I was stumbling, out of control, arms flailing, the hard concrete parking lot rushing up at me in slow motion.

Just once in my life, I’d like for something good to happen to me in slow motion. I don’t have any intensely detailed slow motion memories of getting checks in the mail or getting retweeted or finding out that Boise State lost because my brain only seems to want my life to go into The Matrix mode when it’ll be to elongate a terrible moment that I want to be over as quickly as possible – in this case, falling flat on my face in front of a vanload of models.

Classic Truman Capps moment.

I was never the kid with a raft of broken bones and scabby knees – not because I was blessed with any great amount of coordination or balance, but because I actively shied away from any activity I deemed likely to cause me pain in any way. My main bro Alexander would often show up to school with various half healed cuts or missing limbs that, it seemed, he hadn’t even noticed until somebody pointed them out to him, whereas if I got scratched by a rose bush on my way into somebody’s backyard that was pretty much a season ending injury, because that shit stings.

Needless to say, even with the benefit of slow motion my mind, untrained in split second feats of injury-preventing dexterity, floundered to think of a way to minimize damage to myself:

OH SHIT OH SHIT FALLING okay think Truman you’ve got the slow motion thing going on you can use that to your advantage OH SHIT GROUND GETTING CLOSER okay I’m falling I’m falling how do I keep from hitting the ground STOP FALLING no can’t stop falling FALL UPWARDS no can’t do that either GROUND GETTING CLOSER OH SHIT OH SHIT maybe I should put out my hands YEAH PUT YOUR HANDS OUT AND YOU CAN JUST SPRING LIGHTLY OFF THE GROUND LIKE A FUCKING GAZELLE YOU IDIOT okay cool yeah I’ll do that gazelle thing that sounds pretty cool GOD NO THAT WAS SARCASM YOU’RE GOING TO FUCK UP YOUR HANDS oh shit you’re right well here’s the ground!

I hit the ground with my right hand out, scraping the bejeezus out of my palm and spraining the bejeezus out of my wrist, then managed to bang my knee, shoulder, and chin as I hit the ground. Somewhere in the process I also managed to scrape the shit out of my left palm and jam my left thumb.

”MOOSEFUCKER!” I instinctively yelled – I’d seen a billboard with a moose on it on my way to work that morning and the image had lingered in my head until choosing this moment to make its debut, as though placed there by some divine power.

The unit production manager and several other PAs crowded around me as the models watched with the same bemused disinterest most women have for everything I do.

“Are you okay!? Do you need us to call an ambulance?” The unit production manager, ‘ol whatshername, gasped as she knelt over me.

I shook my head and handed her the lip gloss. “Cheyanne wanted me to give this to you. I’m fine. Hey, and this is super embarrassing, but what was your name again?”

Somewhere in the process of taking me back to the production office and getting me set up with bandages and antiseptic she told me her name again, which I promptly forgot again.

The problem with these injuries is that while they’re not especially serious, they’ve rendered me somehow more useless than I normally am. On my best day I can’t change a tire, throw a ball, hammer a nail, or drink milk, but with both hands missing a bunch of skin, one sprained wrist, and one severely jammed thumb, I actually had to ask somebody to help me seal a Ziplock bag. When you can do as few things as I can, it really hurts to have that number reduced so sharply, so quickly, in front of so many beautiful women.

The next day I was talking to my parents, phone pressed feebly to my face with the couple of functional fingers I had left, and I mentioned the injury in hopes of picking up some sympathy.

“So, wait,” Dad said, once I’d recounted what had happened. “When you fell, did you ninja roll?”

I sighed – my parents have been singing the praises of the ninja roll (tucking your arms and rolling into the fall to absorb the shock) for years, and I’d always been sort of ignoring them because I never planned on falling over again.

“No.” I muttered. “I didn’t ninja roll.”

“Well, see, there’s your problem,” Mom said. “You should’ve ninja rolled.”

“I know, okay? I know. Nobody is more aware of the benefits of the ninja roll right now than me.”

“At least you learned something.” Dad pointed out.

I think it was Kanye West who said, “That which does not kill me can only make me stronger,” and I guess I can see how that’s true, but I think the quote stops short of being accurate. Let’s try: “That which does not kill me can only make me stronger, after an intermittent period of being far weaker than before.”

Truman Capps wants all the haters to click here before they misinterpret comedy for me being a bigger idiot than usual.

Good/Bad

Good news: I got hired as a PA on Wednesday, hence why I didn't update that night - I had to get home, crank out two newsletters for the competition, and then try to grab as much sleep as I could before 7:00 AM call in Torrance.

Bad news: They want me to come in tomorrow too and I only got home tonight at 9:00, giving me enough time to crank out a newsletter and do laundry before having to go to bed in advance of tomorrow's balls early call time.

Good news: $

I'll talk to you Saturday.

Busy



My definition of the term ‘busy’ has changed a lot in the past eight or so years. I mean, not to the point that I now use it interchangeably with the word ‘socket wrench’ or something, but rather how much I have to be doing to consider myself busy.

Take high school, for example – looking back, I have no idea how I pulled that off. Each morning I’d get up at something like 6 for jazz band and then spend seven or eight hours in that concrete and asbestos soul crushing labyrinth, or more, depending on if there was a rehearsal after school. On weekends there was a pretty good chance I’d have a band competition or speech and debate tournament, and let’s not forget about homework. What I’m describing here was just an ordinary week, with midterms/finals far out of sight. I mean, I couldn’t even make the claim that I was ‘too busy’ for a girlfriend, because people far more involved than I still found the time to bone and experiment with drugs between AP study sessions.

I guess I’m just shocked that I didn’t bitch about it more – I mean, trust me, I did bitch about high school a lot, but in retrospect the amount of bitching I did was nowhere near proportional to the amount of work there was to bitch about. And bitching is kind of my thing; I take it pretty seriously. For reference, please see everything I’ve ever written on here. Maybe I just couldn’t see the activity forest for the stress trees.

Because if I learned one thing in the course of my educational career, it’s that I hate being constantly occupied. A lot of my friends were very much the opposite – they’d load up on academic and extracurricular commitments to the point of mental breakdown come finals week, because, in their own (paraphrased and poorly remembered) words, “I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m unoccupied.”

Whenever I heard that line I’d always catch myself wondering if these friends knew about alcohol and video games, or if these were some sort of secret between me and other proud slackers the world over. Either way, what I came to realize in school was that if I couldn’t spend at least 40% of my day farting around and accomplishing nothing of any use to anyone, I’d start to get a little cranky.

The story was the same in college – even when my workload was significantly less than that of some of my friends, I still found myself burning out quickly. I remember winter term of my senior year as a haze of video editing, checkout room idiots, and spinning Mac OSX pinwheels occupying seemingly every moment of my spare time, the looming prospect of a nervous breakdown held at bay by cheap whiskey and 7-11 taquitos – and that was the term that I took 16 credits, otherwise known as the average number of credits taken by University of Oregon students. Me being relieved and eager for a break at graduation was the academic equivalent of a fat man sweating bullets and wheezing as he reaches the top of a short staircase, eager for his next cheeseburger.

In the past ten days, I’ve driven to and from Reno, cranked out newsletters continuously for the screenplay competition I’m working for, PA’d on a no-budget indie film shoot in Orange County, and maintained my usual three day a week internship schedule – which, now that I look at it on the page, doesn’t seem like that much, but it sure feels like it, at least given the typical slovenly pace at which I live my life.

What’s surprising to me is that in spite of the fact that I’ve been going with essentially no break for so long (by my standards), I don’t really feel all that burned out. I mean, sure, I’ve been sacrificing sleep and timely blog updates, and sure, I’ve been keeping my wits about me with slightly more expensive whiskey and 7-11 taquitos, but this is really the first time I can remember that I don’t strictly consider stress to be a bad thing. I’m actually sort of enjoying being constantly occupied.

I think the answer is that I just really didn’t like school. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all the awesome stuff that came with school (friends, football, 50 cent tacos), and if I got a cosmic do-over on my life I’d do it all again, but by and large the school parts of school just weren’t for me. I’m not a fan of the classroom; I don’t consider myself an academia nut.*

*The more lame puns I make, the less you’ll miss my blog the next time I’m late.

And I don’t want to sound like one of those douchebags who excuses his ignorance by adjusting his wide brimmed Yankees cap and saying, ‘Yeah, I learn by doing’, because I don’t even really consider what I’m doing right now to be learning – if anything, I’ve quit learning in favor of doing, and I like that a lot better because personally I feel more productive when I’m out doing things instead of just learning how to do them.

And then I also don’t want to sound like I’m coming out against learning, because I’m not – I recognize that I am learning things every day through small samplings of trial and gigantic amounts of error – it’s just that I’ve never been the guy who got all jazzed about learning things just for the sake of knowing them, hence why if I meet a Spanish speaking geologist I’ll be completely unable to understand him no matter what language he’s talking in.

They say that if you do something you love for a living you’ll never work a day in your life. By that logic I’ve definitely been working these past few days, but I think what makes it enjoyable is that it gives me a chance to watch people who actually are doing what they love, which helps me remember that it’s possible, even for those of us who opted out of AP classes in favor of more Grand Theft Auto time.

Truman Capps hasn't washed his socks in God knows how long.